with never a forthright, narrowing, shallowing, casting up here a snag and there a thicket of reeds. And round and round for miles our canoe followed it, as a puppy chases his own tail; yet Bubbenhall was not, nor any glimpse of Bubbenhall.
Herodotus, if we remember, tells of a village called Is beside the Tigris, far above Babylon, at which all voyagers down the river must put up on three successive nights, so curiously is the channel looped about it. Nor, after twice renewing our acquaintance with one particular guelder-rose bush, did we see our way to doubt the tale when we recalled it that day.
These windings above Bubbenhall have their compensations, keeping both hand and eye amusedly alert as our canoe tacks to and fro, shooting down the V of two shallows, or running along quick water beneath the bank, brushing the forget-me-nots (the flower that Henry of Bolingbroke wore into exile from the famous lists of Coventry, hard by), or parting curtain after curtain of reeds to issue on small vistas that are always new. And Bubbenhall is worth the pains to find—a tiny village of brick and timber set amid elms on a quiet slope, where for ages “bells have knolled to church” from the old brick-buttressed tower above. Below sleeps a quaint mill, also of brick and timber, and from its weir the river wanders northeast, then southeast, and runs to Stoneleigh Deer Park.
A line of swinging deer fences hangs under the bridge, the river trailing between their bars. We push cautiously under them, and look to right and left in amazement. A moment has translated us from a sluggish brook, twisting between water plants and willows, to a pleasant river, stealing by wide lawns, by slopes of bracken, by gigantic trees—oaks, Spanish oaks, and wych-elms, stately firs, sweet chestnuts, and filmy larch coppices. We are in Arden, the land
IN STONELEIGH DEER PARK
of Rosalind and Touchstone, of Jaques and Amiens. Their names may be French, English, what you will, but here they inhabit, and almost we look to spy the suit of motley and listen for its bells, or expect a glimpse of Corin’s crook moving above the ferns, Orlando’s ballads Muttering on a chestnut, or the sad-colored cloak of Jaques beneath an oak—such an oak as this monster, thirty-nine feet around—whose “antique root” writhes over the red-sandstone rock down to the water’s brim. The very bed of Avon has altered. He runs now over smooth slabs of rock, and now he brawls by a shallow, and now,
“where his fair course is not hindered,
He makes sweet music with the enamell’d stones.”
Down to the shallow ahead of us—their accustomed ford—a herd of deer comes daintily and splashes across, first the bucks, then the does in a body. If they are here, why not their masters, the men and women whom we know? We disembark, and letting the canoe drift brightly down stream,